Girlpool's New Album 'What Chaos Is Imaginary' Already Existed

Los Angeles duo Girlpool discovered new parts of themselves on their new album What Chaos Is Imaginary (out February 1). What Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad didn't expect, perhaps, was to find those new parts in old songs.

"The funny thing is, a lot of those songs were written parallel to Powerplant," Tividad tells Exclaim! over the phone. "The thing about art and strides of growth are so complicated to measure. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards, creatively."

What Chaos Is Imaginary, their third record and first since 2017's Powerplant, is the result of more nuanced collaborative effort between Tucker and Tividad.

"Basically, Harmony and I spent a lot of time writing new songs separate from each other after touring off of Powerplant," explains Tucker. "We had all these older songs, and we really wanted them to see the light of day.

"It's really just songs we were writing for no reason other than we love to write songs," adds Tividad. "Some were written years before and after Powerplant, even while we were in each others apartments writing our second album."

They weren't always together, either; "The entire process," explains Tividad, "expands over time. The building of each song was very separate from one another. We formed them apart and brought them together."

As time passes, the duo is reaching for new explorative heights, but the duo are committed to change as a continuous factor, rather than an interruption.

"It's difficult to say there was one challenge when making the album because creating anything really pulls and stretches you in different ways." says Tucker. "One thing we were exploring together on the new album was discovering how our collaboration process looks totally different. What Chaos Is Imaginary was a natural progression. It's not something we forced. It felt right. In that sense it didn't feel challenging."

A lot has developed since they first wrote the songs that appear on the new record. Tucker's use of hormonal replacement has caused his voice to completely change. Putting in the intentional effort to figure things out vocally as an artist during his transition is a testament to how much the band is changing and growing.

Tividad, too, says she's grown more into herself since they initially began making music together. "The timbre of my voice has changed a lot, which is a result of maturing," she says. Collectively, Girlpool sound like a different band than they use to be, in very good ways.

And in any case, nothing is static in the world of Girlpool; What Chaos Is Imaginary is a time capsule, says Tucker: "a transitional, candid picture of many moments in one."